1. Week 03

This week I designed for laser cutting and electronic circuits

A motor controller

In this case I took an existing Electronic Circuit , modified it to be cut out of plywood and had it lasercut. Now I have this piece as an example how it may look like. The idea is that the pupils come up with their own design of a PCB, lasercut it and solder the electronic components.

The outcome would be that they gain experience with the laser cutter in finding the right settingsfor whatever material the choose. They could use inkscape to design their own plywood/cardboard PCB. Because the components needs to be soldered they gain knowledge about simple electronic circuits, basic electrical components and learn how to solder properly.

For those who are really ambitious, there is the possibilty to make a nice box using some online ressources…maybe with live hinges?

In the end they will have a controller for a small continous servo motor.

DIM for DIY

What is always most challenging when using online ressources is that in my experience it never works. This is mostly due to time and place. Time, because a lot of online info is outdated. Some components are not available anymore or changed or got too expensive. Place because, depending on your location and culture, choice of parts or availability of parts may be different. Inches and millimeters. We could consider this as a challenge for puplis to deal with problems in a global world and have it integrated in problem based learning. However, the workshops we do in the fablab are mostly time limited and dealing with those problems would take too much time. Time taken away from the real content of the workshop.

So I always prefer to test the workshop by Doing It Myself.

And it takes some time to figure out which components work best and if they are competible with other. In the ideal case I would like to have a whole bunch of different components where the pupils can choose from but that is moneywise and organisatory wise not possible.